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A35
life
Monday, July 6, 2015 www.guardian.co.tt Guardian
Superhero battles are
notoriously bad news for
urban infrastructure. It s
a populist genre that
developed in the decade-
and-a-half after a col-
lapsing building became
the primary imprinted
image in the American
subconscious, so on one
hand this sort of city-
scale destruction can be
expected.
But as the scope of the
stories being told expands
exponentially to match the
special effects being used
to tell them, the presumed
body count has grown just
as rapidly as the produc-
tion budgets.
For example: In the cli-
max of Superman II, Zod s
team of black-clad villains
attack downtown Metrop-
olis, but the worst they do
is explode a few trucks,
knock out a few walls, and
blow some poor man s ice
cream cone into his face.
Meanwhile, in the climax
of Man of Steel, Zod and
Superman lay full and
detailed waste to a hefty
percentage of the city.
Some audiences critiqued
the film and director Zack
Snyder for the sequence,
in which the two grappling
Kryptonians pinball off
and through buildings,
bringing skyscrapers pre-
sumably filled with inno-
cent bystanders crashing
to the ground. The col-
lateral damage was too
extensive and too faceless
for a hero such as Super-
man, went the line of
thinking.
"I was surprised
because that s the thesis
of Superman for me, that
you can t just have super-
heroes knock around and
have there be no conse-
quences," says Snyder.
The director says he had
always intended for the
dead to be counted.
Indeed, Batman v Super-
man addresses these con-
cerns head-on---Super-
man s victims serve as
Batman s impetus to take
him down. "One of the
things I liked was Zack s
idea of showing account-
ability and the conse-
quences of violence and
seeing that there are real
people in those buildings,"
says Ben Affleck, who
plays Batman. "And in
fact, one of those buildings
was Bruce Wayne s build-
ing so he knew people
who died in that Black
Zero event."
Of course, Man of Steel
is hardly the first (or the
last) superhero movie to
feature grand-scale catas-
trophe. The genre is lit-
tered with detritus. The
third act of Avengers: Age
of Ultron featured an
entire city being lifted into
the atmosphere, and a vil-
lain planning to then
throw it directly at Earth.
Beyond some galactic
being showing up and
playing billiards with the
planets, that s about as
blunt an example of
mega-carnage as can get.
The main difference is in
the tone. "There are other
superhero movies where
they joke about how basi-
cally no one s getting hurt,"
Snyder says. "That s not
us. What is that message?
That s it s okay that there s
this massive destruction
with zero consequence for
anyone? That s what
Watchmen was about in
a lot of ways too. There
was a scene, that scene
where Dan and Laurie get
mugged. They beat up the
criminals. I was like the
first guy, I want to show
his arm get broken. I want
a compound fracture. I
don t want it to be clean.
Iwantyoutogo, Ohmy
God, I guess you re right.
If you just beat up a guy
in an alley he s not going
to just be lying on the
ground. It s going to be
messy."
Zack Snyder defends Man of Steel